Broken Trust Overview

Broken Trust is a Demon Hunting setting. Humanity has been backed into a corner by the invasion of the hordes of Hell, and some brave souls need to fight every day to survive, but also to attempt to find a solution to the problem. I mean, demons running roughshod over the Earth is a problem, right?

Overview: A long ass time ago, before humans did much more than chase after herd animals and hit each other with sticks, the angels had a conflict with a horde of demons. I don’t know, and I don’t much care, whether the demons are leftovers from a war in Heaven, or if they’ve always been there living in Hell. The important thing for this story is that there are angels and there are demons, and they exist. Okay?

So, moving on from that point, the angels and the demons made a pact. Neither side would set foot on Earth until Judgement Day. Now, I can hear you questioning the facts now. “Angels appeared to man in the Bible, and Demons corrupt sinners all the time!” When I said set foot on Earth, I meant bodily. Not summoned, and not projecting a tiny portion of their might so that men can see them. I mean, striding the earth, destroying whatever they want, raping and pillaging civilization. Got it?

Okay, so the Angels keep their word. They don’t even try to find a way to get onto Earth, they just sit back and watch and wait. However, trust the demons to keep to only the letter of an agreement. So some nameless and undoubtedly dead bastard thinks he’s got what it takes to be a sorcerer, a demon summoner. And about eight months ago he makes some mistake, or worse he does everything right and then blows the whole deal by asking a question of the f’in demon lord he’s summoned. That one misstep ended the world as we know it.

The portal opened wide and he freed the entire horde. It lead to devastation, predation and destruction on a massive scale. And don’t look at me like you don’t know what those words mean or that I shouldn’t. I’m more than just a pretty face, alright? So the horde is free to basically rule the world, and since they don’t have anything approaching restraint the world has literally gone to Hell. Luckily for us, there are only a few impossibly strong demons. If you know what you’re doing, you can kill one and live to fight another day. Unluckily for us, most demons are stronger than humans to begin with, so even the weak ones are dangerous to the likes of you and me.

Yeah, even big bad me. Can I tell this story or not, kid? So, it’s been most of a year, with no end in sight, and no angels either. The f’in honorable bastards won’t step foot on Earth to save the teeming masses because they gave their word. Isn’t this Judgement Day already? If not, then we’ve got to eject the evil sons of bitches ourselves, or we’ve got to survive on our own until the end of days. We’re on the bottom of the new food chain, and we’ve got nobody but ourselves to help us claw our way back up. Heck, even if we managed to eject them all by next Christmas, the world’s so f’ed up that I don’t think we’d have enough food to feed everybody that survived for a whole year. We’re in a bad way, but you can’t ever give up fighting, you hear me?

I can already see some of you raising your hands, like you want to ask “How can we do that?” Well, with the invasion of the fallen came a sort of power. Humans have always been smarter than the rest of the creatures running around this planet, but we’ve been weaker than a good amount of them too. Well, we’re not so weak now. If you want to succeed bad enough, you can find reserves that let you go toe to toe with a demon and come out the other end of the fight alive. I often say that folks like me are too stupid to give up. My friend Padre Smith tells me it’s got something to do with human willpower. I don’t think about it too much. I mean, you don’t see everybody get off their ass and kick a demon square in the teeth, but there isn’t anything special about me. Any one of you could do what I do. I just expect most people are too scared, or too coddled, to dig deep enough to find out.

Oh yeah, and I mentioned Padre Smith. She’s a padre of course, which is what we call folks who can rattle off an appeal to God and get a response. We call them that because my crew can’t help but laugh when some misguided fool uses the word saint instead. Padre Smith has my respect as one tough SOB, but she drinks and parties with the rest of my crew whenever we get a moment’s rest. She ain’t no saint! So yeah, Padre Smith has kept my fat out of the fire on more than one occasion. She’s asked God to heal me countless times, and a good half the time He even listens, despite the fact that I have no time for Him. Oh well, it’s not like He can change my mind if He leaves me to die on a dusty, blood spattered roadside.

The last ace we’ve got up our sleeves is that a bunch of other supernaturals have cropped up since the gate opened. We call them Hellbreeds, but you can call them whatever you like, as long as they don’t take an exception to it. There are a good few different types, but I think we’ve seen all the variants by now. There are folks we call Elementals, because they can move around the elements: rain, lightning, sand, fire, and so on, although they are limited to one element. Then there are the Shadows, folks who can blend in and hide so well that they can vanish right in front of you. Magicians can perform tricks, turning one thing into another. Still, it’s not like they can turn demons into ice sculptures or anything truly useful. Lastly, there’s more sorcerers.

I’m gonna speak a bit more about sorcerers because it’s important to understand just one thing about them. They are all total bastards, in my opinion, for getting us into this mess. People usually tell me not to lump everybody together and sentence them all to death, but I can’t take my anger out on the idiotic sap that pulled the gate open, because he’s probably suffering eternal torment right now. Technically speaking, sorcerers draw fancy circles on the ground and summon demons to ask for favors. They tell me ‘Draw the Circle, Say the Words, Present the Price, and Get Your Reward’ is the mantra of the sorcerers. I don’t know much more than that, as I don’t suffer them to live by default.

Still, there are a bunch of new age sorcerers who call on angels instead. Call themselves Devaic Witches or some such. But don’t be taken in by that flowery name. It’s not like there are really two types of sorcerers. There are Devaic Witches, and there are dead stupid sorcerers. Demons don’t need human help to get what they want anymore, and if the slightest crack is present in the circle they draw these days, the demon can get out and wreak havoc on the area, and the body of the idiot mortal who called on them. From what I understand, you can’t even safely call an overlord these days because circles don’t work on them.

So, yeah, Angel Summoning Witches, or stupid, dead bastards. That’s sorcerers for you. Of course, it doesn’t take much for a “good witch of the north” to go all dark if they can’t get the angels to do what they want. So in my book, the only good sorcerer is a dead one, cause every time I hear someone say it can’t get worse, the quality of life around here takes a dive.

The Way Things Are: It’s literal Hell on Earth, and what’s left to be a world worth living in is rapidly decreasing. The demon horde is finite, (in the original number sense, not in the sense that they die from old age or have limitations), but they don’t stop rolling through an area until it’s decimated or subjugated. Nobody’s ever held a bastion of hope from their conquest, they’ve just bugged out or stalled them for a bit. Each continent in the world is controlled by one or more demonic overlords, and there are plenty of humans still living in those large spaces. Some of the humans live in the cracks of demon run society, others hide in the wilderness, still others try to serve the demons in the hope that they’ll be left to live their lives in peace.

Demons aren’t big on peace, so the lost souls, which is what everybody generally calls the masses who have given up, end up doing every menial job imaginable. If demons want a field tilled, lost souls do it… without machinery or animals. If demons want to assault a new pocket of resistance, lost souls are the first troops into the deadly vanguard. If demons get a bit peckish on their way to their saturday night revel, it’s a lost soul that gets consumed. Are you getting the picture? Lost souls don’t have rights, they don’t have a decent quality of life if a demon overseer is hanging around, and it’s pretty much the luck of the draw whether they get picked first in line for some gruesome fate, or if they get to live a good fifteen more days cowering in their bombed out hovel.

Supernatural power is widely visible in the setting, with flashy magician’s tricks, and subtle shadow disappearing acts fully present throughout. It’s so commonplace that few people bat an eye when an elemental throws a fit and destroys the area, they just scramble not to get caught up in the blast. So, magic isn’t something to wonder over. Either you get over the fact that a padre just healed you, or you don’t, but you don’t have time to wonder at the awesome sparkliness of it all. People with gaping mouths tend to die faster nowadays. The situation takes the beauty out of the unnatural, and it’s reduced to just another tool in a war for survival.

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About Byron D. Molix

I am an information technology professional in Missouri. I've been an avid fan of fantasy and science fiction novels, comic books, pen and paper role-playing games, computer games and console video games for the last two decades. My dream would be to one day make a comfortable living while having the time to pursue writing (novels, rpgs, etc.) as a full-time hobby.